Goal Board Achievement Board

As I was working on goals with my littles, I wanted them to be able to mark off when they completed their goal or progress towards their goal. I got a metal board from IKEA and some small achievement stickers from Amazon (okay, I also got a laminator but I've wanted one for a while and it is an investment!).

This is how my board turned out and I LOVE IT. I put it right outside their bedrooms and they pass by it everyday, reminding them to work on their goals. I laminated the background page to make it easier to switch out goals.

 These files can be found HERE on my Etsy shop :)

I've actually updated these files... here is the NEW and IMPROVED goal board....

How it came together for me: 

Primary Goals Treasure Hunt and Lesson - Teach (and learn!) the New Program

SO excited about this activity! This should be a super fun way of teaching the new program and all about how children should be choosing, setting and carrying out goals. In a nutshell, for your activity you will need to:

1. Prepare treasure pieces (prep)

2. Hide treasure piece bowls & clues (prep)

3. Give children map & send on treasure hunt

4. Meet back up after all pieces have been found

5. Goal Setting Lesson

PREP: about 30 mins

NEED: 10 candies per child, scissors and tape

This activity should take about 30 minutes total to prepare, however the preparation on this activity will depend on how many children you have participating. The bulk of the preparation is making the "treasure pieces" ... it took me about 2 mins to cut and tape the candy wrappers for 1 child. Really the only other prep work is hiding/spreading out the 10 bowls of treasure pieces and the clues.

TREASURE HUNT

The first part of the activity is the treasure hunt. The leader will need to prepare 10 "treasure pieces" for each child with candy wrappers that have the different goals on them. I made my candy wrappers to fit the candy "treasures", but as you can see from picture below, they fit pretty much any small candy (this was me using my kids leftover Halloween stash). 

 

Then the leader will want to place all the pieces (1 for each child) for each category in a bowl (I used these Treasure Boxes - promise this is not an affiliate link, I don't know how to do that, but these did make it a little more fun) . SO ALL the "spiritual goals" treasure pieces for ALL children would go in the same bowl. If you have 9 children coming to the activity, you'll want 9 "spiritual goals" pieces of candy all in the same bowl. 

The leader will then hide/spread these 10 bowls out. If I were in an LDS church, I would spread these out across classrooms… hidden if possible. Place the "treasure hunt clues" nearby the bowl to help guide the children to the treasure hunt pieces. On the treasure hunt map, it says "Don’t forget to Seek the help of the Holy Ghost” by looking for clues! They will lead you to the treasure pieces!" You can also say something like "make sure you choose the right" and only take 1 piece from each bowl. The treasure hunt part can go pretty quickly... if you want to stretch it out, I recommend hiding the treasure pretty well. 

The children knew to look in this room for a treasure box because of the
 "Holy Ghost Clue" that was easy to spot in each room. 

Once the activity has started, give each child a “Treasure Map” and a bag (I actually glued the treasure map onto a brown paper bag). Instruct them to go get 1 piece for each item on their map. They will need to collect 1 piece from each bowl. Once all 10 pieces have been collected, meet back for a Goal Setting Lesson. Give them the “Congratulations” scroll.

GOAL SETTING LESSON

sorry the colors are a bit off on this example... promise the real this is correct!

Before the activity, the the leader will want to tape up on a board or where everyone can see it, the scripture poster - put the two pages with the Luke 2:52 scripture together ( will need to cut of fold extra margin) and cut out the four words "wisdom, stature, God, man" so they are ready to be placed on the scripture poster. 

Once everyone who completed the treasure hunt has the “congratulations” scroll, start the lesson by asking 4 volunteers to put the words in the correct place on the poster.  Then post up the four goal categories and make sure all children understand the different categories. You can ask the children to take out the corresponding treasure piece out of their bag while you talk about it. Ask for examples of goals for each category (hint: there are some ideas in the back of the guidebook) 

Next post up the four growth patterns (discover, plan, act, reflect). Use the “children’s goal setting” page shown below to help go ever each pattern. Point out that we also need to be working on memorizing and understand the articles of faith and living my gospel standards, which are both found at the back of the guidebook. At the end of the lesson, pass out the “Children’s Goal Setting” page for children to bring home to their parents. 

For our activity, we laminated the "Children's Goal Setting" page on the back of the " Personal Development Goals" page and gave each child a dry erase marker. For my little eight year old, we have a magnet board in our house just for Primary Goals and he's able to pick goals and easily switch them out. At our activity, we also made sure everyone had a Children's Guidebook and our calendar for the next four months. 

All my files for this activity can be found HEREHere

Youth Activities and Goals Kit for 2020

Momentarily interrupting this primarily Primary blog with a YOUTH Activities and Goals kit. Very similar to the Primary kit, I tweaked a few things to make this work for the youth. Hoping this can be helpful in organizing goal-oriented activities and helping leaders and parents support the youth in their goals :)

To use this invitation (anyone can use this anytime): Go to this blog from your phone, select this picture and "save image" to your phone. Then open it in any photo editing app and add text with your information on it. Save the new invitation with your information, and send your invitation to anyone VIA text (or e-mail)!!

Primary Activities Planning Meeting

So I have these pages available in the "Primary Activities Kit', but wanted to explain them a little more. If you are a little confused about where to start with this new program... you are not alone! While I am no authority on how this should all be done... I thought I would share how I would go about being a Primary Leader and holding activities. 

1 - Host a planning meeting with all the youth. Go over the 4 categories and read their descriptions. Have them brainstorm goals they would like to work on and jot down a bunch of ideas ready to share with the whole group. 

2- After brainstorming lots of goals, have each child decide on one for each category and start thinking about ways they want to accomplish it. This does not need to be shared and can be personal. Also give each child a parent support sheet to take home. Please note there are extra spots under each category. The children were told once they completed their goal, they can choose to work on another one. They may want another copy of the "Personal Development Goals" page, but the parents can keep track of all the goals the child worked on that year in one place. Also, if a child wanted to keep a goal private, a parent could just write "private goal". 

 3- Once the youth have decided on their goals, you can ask if there are any that would like to complete their goal during a Primary activity. They would be in charge of that Primary activity and would plan and organize everything. Have them choose a date, describe the activity and tell you which category their goals falls under. You can start to fill in this calendar and build what your activities will look like together. If there are activities that a youth is not in charge (depending on how many youth you have), then the leader can decide what the activity will be and fill in where needed.

Calendars are also available in 4 months 

 Hopefully this gives some direction on how to get going with Primary Activities! I also have a list HERE of activities to help with your brainstorming :)

Kindness Workshop and Challenge - Primary Activity

A new activity is up in the shop!! I am pretty excited about this one. I call it a "Kindness Workshop". It has 5 different stations and a challenge to take home and work on for about a month. Aside from these pages, you will need pens, scissors and glue. You will also want a little baggie for each participant to bring their challenge home. I recommend having your youth pair up and picking a station. Not each station will take the exact same amount of time, so I would let them rotate just as soon as they are done. All of this is also available in a more blue color scheme... I know some boys who would be turned off by the pink ;) Here are the stations:

All these files are available HERE at my Etsy shop :)

Large 2020 Calendar Poster

I like a calendar where you can see the bigger picture... and not only is this bigger picture, but it's also big enough to see and work with! Thought I would share this here for any Primary Presidents hoping to plan their year out.